The largest U.S. cloud and artificial-intelligence companies spent the weekend pulling forward a wave of power-purchase announcements, racing to demonstrate they can clean up their grid footprint before state regulators in New York, California and Virginia begin imposing the kind of pause Congress declined to enact.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services and Meta Platforms each previewed new clean-energy commitments to investors and to the Energy Department in the 72 hours after Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York signaled an executive order halting new hyperscale interconnections above 300 megawatts. Two of those commitments, signed in principle but not previously disclosed, are expected to be announced publicly in the coming week, according to four people briefed on the talks.

Among them: a 1.4-gigawatt restart-and-expansion deal between a Microsoft-led consortium and Constellation Energy for a previously shuttered Pennsylvania reactor unit, and a 900-megawatt small modular reactor offtake agreement that Amazon has been negotiating with X-energy and Dominion in eastern Virginia. A third deal, smaller and earlier in the pipeline, would tie a Google data-center campus in Ohio to a 600-megawatt gas plant fitted for carbon capture and built adjacent to the load — what the industry has begun calling “behind-the-meter” generation, sited so the power never touches the public grid.

“The political center of gravity moved this week, and it moved against us,” said one senior policy official at a top-three cloud provider, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. “If we want to keep building, we have to show, project by project, that we are bringing our own power and not pulling it off ratepayers’ grid. That is the bar now.”

The pivot reflects a striking change in tone from the same companies that, just three weeks ago, mobilized hundreds of lobbyists to defeat the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez moratorium in the House Ways and Means Committee. With the federal bill dead after the 24-21 vote on April 22, the industry’s calculation has shifted: rather than a single fight in Washington, executives are now staring down a patchwork of state-level reviews in the very jurisdictions where they have the most concentrated buildouts.

A spokesperson for the Information Technology Industry Council declined to address specific deals but said the sector was “responding to legitimate concerns about grid reliability with the kind of long-tenor, capital-intensive commitments that will define the next decade of American infrastructure.” The group has launched a website, AIPoweredAmerica.org, that tracks announced clean-energy contracts and posted nearly 11 gigawatts of new disclosures over the weekend alone.

Power-sector analysts said the announcements are real but incomplete. Most of the new nuclear capacity will not come online before 2029 at the earliest, and the small modular reactor projects depend on a Nuclear Regulatory Commission certification process that has slipped repeatedly. Behind-the-meter gas, meanwhile, sidesteps state utility-commission oversight but not state environmental review, and several of the announced projects are in counties where local opposition is already organizing.

“This is the right direction, and it is also a stall,” said Priya Ramaswamy, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center who has tracked the moratorium debate. “If you net out everything that was announced in the last seventy-two hours, you get maybe four to five gigawatts of firm new clean capacity over the next four years. The companies are asking to build roughly fifty gigawatts of new compute load over the same period. The math is closer than it was, but it still does not close.”

The financial stakes are visible in the equity market. Constellation Energy shares gained 7.8 percent for the week, NRG Energy 5.2 percent, and Vistra 4.4 percent. Shares of the small modular reactor developers NuScale and X-energy’s recent SPAC vehicle rose sharply in late-week trading on volume that several traders described as unusual for a Friday before earnings. The Nasdaq itself closed Friday up 1.3 percent on the week, with hyperscaler names contributing most of the gain.

Tech executives are also moving on a second front. Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood is scheduled to host a call with utility-commission staff from New York, California, Virginia, Ohio and Texas on Tuesday, two people familiar with the planning said, to walk through the company’s proposed grid-impact disclosure framework. Google has briefed Hochul’s office twice since Thursday on a “clean transmission tariff” idea under which the company would underwrite the cost of new transmission capacity in exchange for accelerated interconnection. Both initiatives are intended to give state regulators tools that fall short of an outright moratorium.

The political response from state capitals has been wary. A spokesperson for Hochul said the governor “welcomes new clean-energy investment” but that her planned interconnection review would proceed on the timeline she had announced. Sacramento was more pointed: a senior aide to Gov. Gavin Newsom, asked about the Amazon-Dominion deal, said California “is glad Virginia is getting more nuclear” but that “what happens on the Eastern Interconnection has no bearing on whether we approve a hundred-megawatt training campus in Tracy.”

In Washington, the response has split along the now-familiar lines of the moratorium fight. Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a statement Saturday, dismissed the weekend’s announcements as “billionaire-sponsored greenwashing” and said any new commitments should be matched by enforceable rate protection for residential customers in the affected service territories. House Speaker Mike Johnson, by contrast, praised the deals as proof that “the free market, not bureaucrats in Albany, will solve the energy needs of the AI age.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration was “encouraged” and reiterated that the Energy Department would treat any state moratorium as a matter of “serious federal concern.”

Earnings reports from Microsoft and Alphabet on Wednesday and Thursday are expected to bring the question of capital expenditure and grid strategy into clearer focus. Analysts polled by FactSet expect combined data-center capital spending guidance for the four largest U.S. hyperscalers to come in near $340 billion for the year, up from a March consensus of $315 billion, with the increase driven by the pull-forward of clean-power commitments rather than incremental compute capacity.

Industry officials said further announcements would be timed to coincide with the earnings cycle and with the rollout of Hochul’s executive order, which is expected Monday in Albany.